Gigabit Ethernet Based Image Acquisition and Processing System For IR Camera

Abstract

Ethernet has become perhaps the most popular communication technology in use today. One of the application of the Ethernet is high-speed data acquisition. The IR camera used here is capable of taking 50 images/second. The images are converted into 14-bit digital image using the IR sensor electronics. To transfer the images at such a high rate, a gigabit Ethernet based technology is chosen. But transferring data at such a high speed will make the computer busy in sending and receiving the data from the network and the processing tasks to be performed by the CPU will get a ected. So, a TCP/IP O oad Engine (TOE) is used to takeo the load of data transfer from the CPU. As the TOE has the TCP/IP protocol implemented in hardware, it does the dedicated job of data transfer on the network and thereby greatly increases the speed of data transfer. Once the data is transferred from the network, the images are reconstructed in the LabVIEW based in client application and are stored in the computer for further processing. A FPGA is used to generate various command and control signal for ADC and TCP/IP O oad Engine(TOE) and for generating signals for opening and closing the communication with client. To process the images, again the LabVIEW is used for developing the image processing application. This application produces the histogram of the whole image as well as that of the selected region (called the Region of Interest (ROI)) along with the image statistics like the standard deviation, mean value etc.